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retailers in good design. They want long-lasting products that please customers over multiple uses. Traditional retailers generally prefer products with a short life span, so the customer will buy a new one. Third, Mesh businesses often purchase core products directly from the manufacturer, and lots of them. A bike-sharing company will typically buy many bikes. That creates the possibility for rich flows of information about customers between the bike manufacturer and the bike-sharing business. The result is well-built bikes that last, and with the features customers want. Aggregated information about the customer can also flow the other way, back to the customers themselves. Tripkick, for instance, accumulates consumer experiences about hotels to help users choose the perfect hotel room. Again, the greater number of transactions in the Mesh yields more precise and actionable information for all parties and parts of the value chain, from the manufacturer to the consumer.

The forces described here are unlikely to go away. The global population is growing, while resource scarcity and climate change drive up costs. The worldwide recession has bred distrust of old business models, but also openness to different approaches. The spread of integrated Web, mobile, and social networks is global, large, and accelerating. Mesh businesses, which use sophisticated information systems to profit from sharing resources, are ideally positioned to take advantage of these trends. Are you?

5

In Mesh We Trust

WHAT’S HERE: trust erosion, or sandbags and other customer-retention strategies; trials, the first date all over again; delight is contagious and so is its evil twin; caution when cussing at customers.

On almost certainly the last night that Sarah Kohl-Leaf will ever go to the St. Croix Falls Cinema in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, she tried to purchase movie tickets for herself, her husband, and two friends with a credit card. The ticket clerk told her the theater didn’t accept credit cards, or debit cards, and she should use the theater’s ATM. She tried, but the ATM was out of cash. Fortunately, one of her friends had a check, and was able to buy the tickets. Sarah, her husband, and their two friends took their seats, and that might have been the end of the story. But according to Sarah, five minutes after the film began, a member of the staff walked in and demanded to see everyone’s ticket stub. The staff member suspected some people of sneaking in, and spent the next twenty minutes examining every ticket with a flashlight. While the movie played.

That night Sarah e-mailed the theater management. “I would rather drive to White Bear Lake, where they obviously know how to run a theater, than have this experience again,” she wrote. Sarah’s complaint landed on the desk of Steven Payne, a vice president at Evergreen Entertainment LLC, the owners of the St. Croix Falls Cinema. Here is his reply in full:

Sarah,

Drive to White Bear Lake and also go fuck yourself. If you dont [sic] have money for entertainment, get a better job, and don’t pay for everything on your credit or check card. You can also shove your time and gas up your fucking ass. Also, find better things to do with your time. This email is an absolute joke. We don’t care to have you as a customer. Let me know if you need directions to white bear lake [sic].

Steven

We know this was his reply because a friend of Sarah’s cousin created a Facebook page entitled “BOYCOTT St. Croix Falls Cinema 8” and posted the e-mail exchange that Sunday. By Wednesday, the page had over 3,300 fans, according to a write-up in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the number grew to over 5,500 within a month. The population of St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, is 2,210.

Steven Payne, it barely needs saying, was forced to apologize. He suggested it had been a tough time of management transition, and claimed to be addressing issues at the theater that had arisen without his knowledge. “At Evergreen Entertainment, customer service is an important part of our business,” he wrote.